Survivalist circularity: theorising fragility and displacement within necessity-driven circular economies

Abstract

The scholarship on circular economy (CE) is increasingly recognising that in low income contexts, repair, reuse, repurposing, second-hand exchange and material recovery may be driven by economic necessity rather than environmental intention. This paper builds on the established necessity-driven circular economy and develops a narrower, mechanism-level construct of survivalist circularity. Survivalist circularity is defined as circular material practices that can only be sustained under a binding material or livelihood constraint. The construct and its boundaries are defined by a purposive conceptual synthesis of CE, informal recovery, sustainable-livelihoods, frugal-innovation, value-retention, measurement and just-transition literatures. Five testable propositions and a two-axis model relate material constraint to institutional support for value retention. The main prediction is conditional displacement, whereby relaxing a binding constraint decreases the necessity-attributable component of circular practice, while total circularity decreases only where designed, institutional, market or value-based drivers do not substitute. Our paper makes four contributions. It theoretically detects a constraint-contingent mechanism and a temporal displacement risk in necessity-driven CE. It distinguishes survivalist circularity from informality, frugal innovation and geographic or poverty labels in terms of construction. Methodologically, it prioritises the distinction between formal CE institutionalisation and directly observed material practice. In policy, it defines institutional substitution as the sequencing of repair access, secondary markets, safe recovery systems and worker protections before or as necessity weakens. Thus the construct is not a label for Global South or low-income circularity generally, but a testable causal regime, whose value for empirical work depends on demonstrating counterfactual dependence on constraint.